Fashionable Friends [read: really just fashionable Lela]

Summers in Boston mean being exponentially closer in distance to my friends in NYC than summers in Sarasota. Which means grabbing your weekender and getting on a cheap bus, starting with Lela! This past weekend she made the trek from NYC for a total of two, get ’em, two days. As you know, Lela is impeccably fashionable. Right now, she’s working for a designer she actually likes in the fashion industry for her co-op as a Drexel student. I’d say, as a result, that this was an artsy weekend full of fashion on the surface level. But, as you will soon learn, it was also an extremely clumsy weekend we attempted to make appear seamless on the surface with a lot of fashion.

I trusted Lela would understand the T, after living in cities on cities, but she started off the trip by missing my location by about 3 T stops. So we walked and met halfway before dragging ourselves, in all black everything, to brunch at Trident. If there’s anything in which you can trust, it’s a good Trident brunch. The rest of the day we planned to spend at the Museum of Fine Arts for a very ‘Lela-esque’ exhibit hashtagged “tech-style” {say it out loud, then you’ll get it} featuring innovative fashion. Lela was in heaven, and I pretty much stared at everything in awe. Dresses that fold into a gold-lined Pythagorean theorem, moved little pins along sounds, and most importantly, molded to look like water? Nothing about this exhibit was casual.

We spent the next few hours checking out contemporary art (styrofoam cups stole the show) before meeting up with a friend from high school, Elle, who attends Wellesley and comes into the city for art classes. That’s right, more art. It was nice to catch up and it was only the beginning of a very Pine View-themed weekend in ways we hadn’t expected. The night was silly, after we finished a 4-course Indian meal because as Beyonce says, “a winner don’t quit on themselves.” It was rough.

Finding this room is a fun story for another time.

We scheduled brunch the next morning at Stephanie’s on Newbury for 9:45 AM, the exact second we would no longer be full. However, that was clearly shortsighted as the monkey bread for the table was too much and we spent the rest of the meal trying to recover from wild amounts of food. This was also ‘Day of Art’ #2 as we went to SoWa Open Market in the South End. It’s a staple of the Bostonian summer as an open-air market paired with the indoor vintage market and artists’ studios of the Artists Guild. Lela challenges me to be trendy, which I’m trying to carry on even as she left for NYC on Sunday, so we bought some crazy-looking binocular/groovy sunglasses, enameled necklaces, good old flannel, and yet another brown embossed-leather bag. Lela and leather go so well together, as do leather and laces (in her most recent fashion show). It prompted a response from her boyfriend, “I guess Sneha’s into art too?” Yes, yes she is.

Still trying to be Lela.

It was a windy, rainy day so we walked over the Massachusetts Avenue bridge into Cambridge, MIT, for an early dinner before catching her bus back. In the hour before leaving, we sat in a small park in Cambridge to eat our sandwiches. In this short amount of time, however, we ran into two more people from Pine View. That’s right, two! Both friends of Lela’s older brother (speaking of which, were you here too Clark?) and both causing us to laugh at how random life can be. Or I suppose how small the world can be. Either way, we were laughing the entire weekend. Whether it was consuming copious amounts of food, awkward high school encounters, tripping our way to place after place, there was a lot of laughing.

Lela and I became fast friends in college, even though we went to school together for like 8 years. She needed a place to stay for an MIT fashion show, and I live in Boston. We were so inseparable, I caught a flight to Philadelphia two weeks later. And it’s been silly since. She’s turning 21 in two weeks, so I’m working on catching a bus to NYC for another French Model Reunion: Birthday Edition. Will keep y’all posted on that, hopefully it’ll be more art and fashion and Lela will keep me young, but who’s counting?